The Second Sister (11 page)

Chapter 17

A
lice was the smart sister. Unless you'd met her before the accident, you wouldn't know that, but it's true.

Alice had twenty-four IQ points on me. The reason I know that is because my father told me. The first time he said it, I didn't know what IQ meant, but I understood his tone.

I was a disappointment to my dad. One of many.

Raised on a not very prosperous farm north of Sacramento, Dad decided early on that education would be his ticket out of the hard, boring life in the country. But college and vet school tuition left him deeply in debt, and so when he graduated from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, he didn't have money to start or buy into a practice in the city. That was the first disappointment.

He was offered only two jobs, one in Kansas and the other in Wisconsin. Dr. Sutton, a sixty-three-year-old vet from Door County who was getting too old for the long hours and physicality of a large animal practice focused mostly on dairy cattle, promised to let Dad have the practice when he retired. Dad took the job, figuring that ownership of a lucrative practice would make up for having to live in the country and work with cows. Except it didn't work out that way.

By the time Dad took over the practice, farmers in the county were beginning to sell off their dairy herds. They couldn't compete with the big corporate operations. Before long, Dad's practice was struggling. He couldn't afford to expand the family cottage that my grandparents had deeded to them when Mom married Dad, or to buy a new car, or to go on vacation. He opened a small animal clinic, but it never brought in much. People preferred to drive their animals to the clinic down in Sturgeon Bay rather than go to my dad.

The truth is, people in the county never took to him. They felt that he thought he was better than them, and they were right about that. He was one of those people who deal with their insecurity by acting superior and end up coming off like egotistical jerks. It didn't help that he was married to my mother, a nice woman from a nice family who had lived on the peninsula for decades, but didn't treat her very well.

Nilson's Bay is the kind of place where you can dial a wrong number and end up having a twenty-minute conversation with whoever answers. Everybody knows everything about everybody, the good and the bad.

When it came to my father, it seemed like the bad always outweighed the good—partly because he could rarely see the good.

He was disappointed with his practice, prospects, and income, disappointed with his life and his wife, with a little house in a little town, with his failure to obtain all that he felt was due him. When my mother told him that she was expecting again and that the new baby would be born just seventeen months after their first child, whose arrival had further stretched their already tight finances, he was more than disappointed; he was resentful. His resentment toward my mother manifested itself in frequent arguments and constant criticism. He criticized me, too, but more often than not, he simply ignored me. In some ways, I think that was worse.

My mother tried to make excuses to explain away my father's indifference. But the older I got, the more hollow those explanations sounded. Though she'd originally converted to Catholicism just so she could marry my father, Mom was zealous in her faith and wouldn't consider divorce. As the years went by, she immersed herself more and more deeply in the life and work of the church, organizing events and fund-raisers, chairing the annual Bishop's Appeal, teaching catechism, and eventually becoming a lay minister. I don't doubt that her faith was a solace, but I'm also sure she was happy for any opportunity to get away from my father. Seeing her tireless efforts on behalf of the parish and undoubtedly knowing how difficult her marriage was, people often said my mother was a saint. She was a good person, and I know her faith was absolutely real and sincere, but . . . a saint?

I've sometimes wondered if, at some level, my mother didn't enjoy the sympathy that came her way. There's a fine line between religious devotion and martyrdom, and by the time I entered high school, I think Mom was starting to edge in that direction. After the accident, of course, the journey was complete. She became a martyr to her works of faith, to the brain-injured daughter whose spark of promise was forever doused, and to the misery of her marriage.

I've always wondered why Dad didn't seek a divorce. Though he was born and raised Catholic, he rarely attended mass. Every year my mother would write a check to the Bishop's Appeal and every year they would have a big argument about it. So it wasn't religious zeal that kept my father in the marriage. I think it was because he didn't want to risk losing Alice. She was the only thing in life that didn't disappoint him.

 

Alice was smart, like Dad. She had his scientific mind and shared his interest in animals. She was a good athlete, too, and fearless. She loved to skate and swim. She could ride any horse, no matter how wild, and climb any tree, no matter how high. Really, Alice could do almost anything she set her mind to. Before the accident, she was a straight-A student who planned to follow in her father's footsteps and become a vet, as well as a better-than-average pianist and a talented artist.

Like I said, there was nothing Alice couldn't do. Including charm my dad. Let me tell you,
that
took some doing. I tried and failed for sixteen years. The only times my father seemed to notice me was when he was pointing out how far short of the mark I fell in comparison to my sister.

He was just a very critical, bitter, and deeply unhappy man. With time and distance—as well as a year of professional counseling—I can now look back logically and see that my father's dislike of me stemmed more from his personality flaws than from mine. But it wasn't as easy when I was five, ten, fifteen years old.

During those months of counseling, my therapist refused to believe me when I said I didn't resent my sister, but I truly didn't. Of course we had arguments—all siblings do—and I can't say I was never jealous of Alice, but I didn't resent her. Alice was good to me. She helped me with my homework and stuck up for me if Dad got too abusive. One time, when he said something demeaning to me when my friend Denise had come to spend the night, Alice refused to speak to him for two days. He was nicer to me after that, for a while.

And then, of course, Alice saved my life.

 

I was ten years old when it happened; Alice was nearly twelve. It was a Saturday in mid-March. Mom was at some meeting at church and Dad was out on a call. Alice and I decided to go ice-skating. It was a little late in the season, but still cold, and the ice on the north end of the pond was still plenty thick. We weren't being stupid or careless; we knew enough to check for things like that. Any kid raised on the peninsula would. But we didn't count on me losing control while I was attempting a spin, falling and sliding toward the south end of the pond, where the ice was thinner even though the water was deeper, and falling through.

I don't remember a lot about it, except that the water was so cold that it was actually painful. All that comes back in the dream. I can actually feel that cold piercing through me like thousands of needles, but I didn't start having that dream until a year or so after Mom and Dad died.

Alice risked her own life saving mine. She lay belly down on the ice, reached down into the hole, grabbed me by the hair, and pulled me out. It was incredibly brave of her, but also incredibly foolish; we both could have been killed. She should have run for help instead of trying to save me alone.

That's what Dad said later. It was the only time I ever heard him yell at Alice. She wasn't fazed a bit, though. She just looked at him and said that if she'd gone to get help, it would have been too late, which was probably true. I wouldn't have survived long at those temperatures, and the nearest house was a half mile down the road.

“I couldn't let her drown,” Alice said simply. “She's my sister.”

So how could I resent Alice? If not for her, I probably wouldn't be here.

 

News of how eleven-year-old Alice Toomey risked her own life to rescue her little sister spread quickly through Nilson's Bay and beyond. Somebody took it upon himself to call the papers, and soon reporters from as far away as Green Bay showed up on our doorstep wanting to interview my sister and take her picture.

Sometimes they wanted to talk to me, too, but quickly lost interest in a little girl who refused to smile into the camera and supplied one-word answers to their list of tediously similar questions....

Scared.

Fine.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

I was surprised that media people weren't more creative. They all asked the same obvious and meaningless queries, questions they already knew the answers to. I've been interviewed dozens of time since then, and my opinion of the media hasn't changed much. Maybe I expect too much. Few people are brave enough to pose a question unless they are fairly certain of and comfortable with the answer. I guess that's just human nature, isn't it?

Alice was more cooperative than I was, submitting to having her picture taken over and over, and more forthcoming in her responses, giving illuminating answers that were neither too long nor too short, coming off as precocious and heroic but humble. Eleven years old and she'd already mastered the art of the thirty-second sound bite. It was impressive.

On the fourth day the stream of reporters became a trickle, and on the sixth it stopped entirely. The news cycle turned and our lives went back to normal.

But people in Nilson's Bay have longer memories than the media. For months and even years afterward, they would talk about how Alice saved me, and though everyone already knew all about it, they'd ask my father, my mother, or Alice to tell the story, or they'd repeat it to themselves or one another if none of the principals was available.

If I was in earshot, they'd ask me the same questions that those reporters had asked....
Were you scared? Are you grateful? Is your sister a hero? Do you want to be like her?

Raised to be respectful of my elders, I said yes to everything, never pointing out that their questions were silly and that my answers should have been obvious.

Of course I was scared.

Of course I was grateful.

Of course I thought my sister was a hero. Everyone did.

Of course I wanted to be just like her.

I'd never wanted anything else.

 

A mournful yowl from one of the gray plastic cat carriers snapped me back to the present. I got down on my haunches and peered through the metal grating in front of the cages.

The carrier on the left held a sleek black cat with green eyes, skinny and skittish, who shrank back toward the rear wall of the carrier when I stuck a finger through the grating, trying to touch his fur. The one on the right contained a huge blue-eyed calico with brown, gray, and cinnamon fur and a white chest and nose, at least twice the size of the black cat.

I stuck my finger through the grate. “Let me guess. You must be Freckles,” I said. “The food thief. Am I right?”

The cat stared at me for a moment, then yawned and turned her head away.

I carried both crates inside before I unlatched the doors. When I did, Dave, the little black cat, shot out of the crate and hid under the sofa. Freckles squeezed her bulk through the cage door, sauntered into the kitchen, sat down in front of the cupboard to the left of the sink, and started to yowl. Not surprisingly, when I opened the cupboard I discovered a bag of cat kibble and half a case of canned cat food.

Freckles began wolfing down a can of chicken liver and rice the moment I placed the bowl on the floor. I called and called and even meowed for Dave to come eat, but got no response, so I fixed up a smaller dish with kibble and wet food mixed together and set it on the floor, just at the edge of the sofa, before carrying my suitcase upstairs.

There were three bedrooms upstairs. The largest, facing the front of the house, had belonged to my parents. You'd have thought that the master bedroom would be on the side with the better view, but my father hadn't liked being woken by the morning sun reflecting on the lake. The other two bedrooms, one on each side of the hall bath, had belonged to Alice and me. Alice's room was just the same, but mine had been turned into a sewing room.

So that left me with the choice of sleeping in Alice's bed or in my parents'—which seemed like no choice at all. Then I remembered the hide-a-bed in the living room sofa. My mother had nicknamed it the Iron Maiden and said it discouraged guests from overstaying their welcome. Not a very comfortable option, but it would have to do for now.

I left the suitcase in the hall and went back downstairs. Freckles was hunched down like a plump mushroom next to the sofa, scarfing down the food I'd left for Dave. I clapped my hands and hissed. Freckles looked up and then ran around me and up the stairs. Considering her weight, her speed was impressive.

I got down on my hands and knees and tried to coax Dave out of his hiding place, but he wouldn't move. All I could see was glittering eyes. I carried the empty food dish into the kitchen and rinsed it out.

And, after that . . . I sat down on a dining room chair and stared for close to an hour at the big round thermostat that sits outside the window. I didn't know what to do with myself.

“Just living” comes harder to some people than to others.

Chapter 18

T
he next day, I called Jenna. She sounded harried.

The winning team had gone into full, victorious transition mode, and word had quickly gotten around the office that Ryland had tapped her to help manage the process. Every campaign donor, staffer, and intern within a five-hundred-mile radius was stopping by to congratulate her—and drop off a résumé.

The fourth time we were interrupted by someone who popped in unannounced and just wanted “thirty seconds” of her time, I told her to lock the door and turn off her office lights until we were able to finish our conversation.

“Maybe they'll think you've gone to lunch.”

Jenna groaned. “I can't get anything done! I bought a door sign that says, ‘Don't Even Think About Knocking: History Being Made.' Didn't help.”

“Funny, but too subtle,” I said. “Get a Doberman, one with really big teeth. Let's wrap this up before somebody else comes barging in. Now, before you forward any of those résumés for the slots in the DOJ, be sure to—”

“Run them by Joe Feeney,” she said. “I know. You told me that twice already.”

“I did? With all the interruptions, it's hard to keep track.”

“How are you doing?” Jenna asked. “You sound tired.”

“I didn't sleep at all last night.” I yawned. “There's this metal bar in the sofa and no matter how you lay, it hits you right in the back. And then, just to make things extra fun, Alice's cat, the big one, jumped on me and started yowling at about two-thirty in the morning. Wouldn't leave me alone until I got up and fed her. The jerk.”

Just then, as if she'd heard me, Freckles sauntered from the kitchen into the dining room and started to rub against my legs.

Jenna clucked her tongue. “You slept on the couch? What's wrong with the bedroom?”

I picked up my coffee mug and slurped my tea. Hopefully, the two bags of that nasty, perfume-tasting Earl Grey, which were all I was able to unearth in the kitchen, would deliver close to the same amount of caffeine as one cup of real coffee. Pathetic. How could Alice not have coffee? Or any cereal that didn't contain flaxseeds and raisins? The second I could summon up enough energy to get dressed, I was going to the grocery store for supplies.

“Nothing's wrong with the bedrooms,” I said. “But I just don't . . . I don't know. I felt funny about sleeping in Alice's bed.”

“Well, you can't sleep on the sofa bed for the next seven weeks. Maybe if you change the sheets, get some new blankets, or move the bed to another part of the room it'll feel more like your own.”

“Maybe. Listen,” I said, changing the subject, “I know you're leaving for DC on Wednesday, but I need you to do me a favor before you go, kind of a big one.”

“Okay,” Jenna said.

She sounded hesitant, and I didn't blame her. She had so much on her plate, and, technically, she didn't really work for me anymore, but I just had to have someone go over to my apartment to open the door for the movers and hang around while they packed up my stuff and put it in storage. I'd tried to think of other people I could ask, but couldn't think of anybody who owed me that many favors—except Jenna. I'd hired her for her very first grown-up job, and now, not quite three years later, she was on her way to Washington. Plus, when I followed her to the capital in a few weeks, she'd undoubtedly be working for me again. As her benefactor and future boss, I was allowed to impose.

I explained what I needed, and she said, “So all I have to do is sit there while they pack? That's not so bad. I'll take my computer. Bet I'll get more done at your apartment than I would—No! Out!”

I jerked the phone away from my ear. Jenna's sudden shout startled me so that it was an involuntary reaction. When I got back on I heard a
thunk,
as if she'd dropped the phone on her desk, and then her voice, still agitated but farther away. After a moment, she was back.

“Sorry. I had to yell at Graham Needham—”

“The weaselly press intern? The one who wears bow ties?”

“That's him. I told him three times that he has to put in his application and go through the process like everyone else, but he won't give up. He barged in without knocking. Brought me an azalea plant.”

“Uh-huh. Because nothing says ‘I'm the guy for the job' like a potted plant. You know,” I said, glaring down at Freckles, who was still rubbing against my legs, feigning affection when all she really wanted was to be fed—again, “I was feeling bad about missing all the fun, but I'm starting to think there are worse things than being banished to the wilds of Wisconsin.”

“There are,” Jenna agreed. “Listen, I've got to go. When will your movers arrive?”

“Eight o'clock tomorrow. Should be done by lunchtime. There isn't that much stuff. And could you do me another favor? I wasn't planning on staying more than a few days, so I only brought a couple of outfits—”

“Two navy blue suits and a pair of khakis?”

“Something like that,” I said. “I'm going to need some warmer things—sweaters, jeans, jackets—just casual stuff, and some gloves and boots. Could you pull some stuff out of my drawers and send it up here?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, and one more thing.... There's two cases of Samoas in the utility closet. Could you send one of them?”

“You want me to mail you a
case
of Girl Scout cookies?”

“Humor me, okay? Samoas are my comfort food. I need all the comfort I can get right now. Have you talked to the president-elect today?”

“Just for a second this morning. He added a name to the list of associate DOJ candidates. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” I said, taking a quick slurp of tea and pushing Freckles away with my foot. The cat took the hint and slunk off, giving me a spiteful glare. I glared back, unfazed. If Her Plumpness wanted another meal, she could go catch a mouse.

“Just wondering if he needs anything. The computer connection is fine here; I could work remotely with no problem.”

“Lucy,” she said in a tone that hovered somewhere between motherly and patronizing and was starting to irritate me, “it's not like everybody has suddenly forgotten about you—you're supposed to be resting.”

“Yeah, well. Resting turns out not to be my strong suit. I'm better at doing.”

“So do something. Go for a walk. Or shopping. Get a hobby.”

“A hobby?”

“Don't make it sound like a dirty word. People can have lives outside of work, you know. I took up knitting last year. It's a great stress reliever. Plus I got all those cute scarves.”

I remembered Jenna's scarves. She must have had twenty of them, all exactly the same except for the yarn. I'd have sooner poked a knitting needle in my eye than used one to make the same scarf two dozen times.

“I don't think I'm the knitting type. But it probably would be a good idea to get out of the house. Come to think of it,” I said, “hold off on sending the clothes. I spotted a consignment shop in town. I think I'll go see what they've got.”

“You still want the cookies?”

“Oh, yes. As quickly as possible. Express mail, dog sled, helicopter—whatever it takes. I'm in withdrawal.”

“Drop them out the back of Air Force One?”

“Is that an option?”

Jenna laughed. “As long as you don't mind being the subject of a congressional investigation.”

“So maybe just call FedEx instead.”

“I'm on it, boss.”